Starting next fall, UC Berkeley will admit hundreds of additional out-of-state residents and international students instead of Californians as a way to make up for state budget cuts.

Chancellor Robert Birgeneausaid Tuesday that his campus will be admitting as many as 600 fewer "unfunded" California students a year to offset a 20 percent cut from Sacramento. Those slots will instead go to out-of-staters.

The problem is that the state picks up much of the university's cost of educating California students - only it's not paying for as many students as it used to. Nonresidents, on the other hand, pay their own, higher tuitions that actually cover UC's cost of educating them.

Birgeneau said he understands that people will be angry that Berkeley will be freezing out Californians in favor of students from elsewhere. But, he said, "that upset needs to be directed to Sacramento."

At present, about 14 percent of the 13,000 freshmen who win admission to Berkeley each year are nonresidents. A task force of faculty and administrators recently recommended pushing that number up to 23.2 percent for the fall semester.

We're told the idea is also being looked at for both UCLA and UC San Diego which, like Berkeley, attract large numbers of out-of-state applicants.

UC President Mark Yudoff's office insisted that boosting out-of-state admissions was not contrary to the university's commitment to guarantee enrollment for the top 12 percent of California high school students. But given the budget cuts, the system will be admitting 2,500 fewer in-state students next year, regardless of whether it takes more from elsewhere.

"Obviously, it's not what we want to do," said UC Berkeley Materials Science and Engineering Professor Fiona Doyle, a member of the faculty and administrative committee that made the admissions recommendation. "It's a compromise, very much so."

State Sen. Leland Yee, D-San Francisco, who has been a persistent critic of UC spending policies, called the move "extremely frustrating" and said it was time for the university to stop blaming Sacramento for all its problems.

"All of us taxpayers thought we would have UC to educate our children," Yee said. "But more and more, it seems to take care of other individuals - be it high-paid executives or out-of-state students."

Gang prevention: One of first things new Oakland Police Chief Anthony Battsis going to be asked about is what happened to the department's highly touted gang task force.

"I'll be meeting with the chief Thursday and I intend to raise the issue with him," City Councilman Larry Reid said.

Reid said the eight-member gang task force - the focus of a recent Discovery Channel documentary - was one of the cops' most effective weapons against gangs in East and West Oakland, until turf and egos got in the way.

From what we've been told, tensions between the unit and the police brass had been growing over how the anti-gang cops should be deployed.

"This was all about who was in charge," Reid said.

Whatever the case, task force members said "nuts to this" - and it was agreed they should go back to patrol.

"They're going to tell you that unit was actually expanded, that it was folded into a bigger operation, but everyone knows what happened," said one cop who asked not to be named out of fear for retribution.

Police Department officials did not return calls for comment.

Secret police: Protecting the president from protesters wasn't the biggest headache for police during President Obama's visit to San Francisco - it was protecting the public from the Secret Service.

Sure, there were a few protest problems. Code Pinkers tried to unfurl a giant banner from the top of Macy's, only to have it fall to the ground. And one man was picked up in Union Square wearing an FBI blazer and carrying a knife and collapsible baton.

But a source on the police detail tells us the biggest problem Thursday was protecting pedestrians from the fast-moving presidential motorcade that raced back and forth between the St. Francis Hotel and the Intercontinental at Fifth and Howard streets, where the president spent the night.

As usual, the cops aren't talking about cost, telling us that's a matter of security.

We do know that 32 parking control officers were pulled in to help with Obama's visit - so a good part of the city got a ticket holiday.

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